A speech-driven patient-centered knowledge-server prototype, produced during Phase I, brings knowledge access to the point-of-care. It does this by making use of selected items from a Computer-based Patient Record (CPR), e. g., "histology" and "stage", by anticipating certain care-giver information needs, e. g., "staging", "therapy" "protocols", and by trying to satisfy those needs from PDQ. CANCERLIT, or the textbook Principles and Practice of Oncology. Phase II will implement Phase I concepts by representing the schema of each source in the UMLS Metathesaurus by using templates to select paths through the enhanced Metathesaurus to retrieve the relevant source paragraphs, by using a "blackboard" to translate codes from the patients CPR into the terms required to fill in the templates, and by publishing the knowledge-server interface as a standard. The knowledge-server will be deployed with and without speech-input: I) on the Internet, 2) on a CD-ROM, 3) as a custom application in tow or more commercial CPR systems, and 4) as a standard application accessible from any CPR system. The combination of a CPR and a knowledge-server at the point of care is much more compelling than either is alone. Awardee's statement of the potential commercial applications of the research: A physician's workstation, which supports both a CPR and patient-centered knowledge-access, with optional speech input will be attractive to physicians nurses, and other care-givers. Even if it is not fully integrated, a sampling of CPR vendors believe that knowledge-access will prove attractive as long as it is available on the same screen. Omnipresent networks will alleviate the short-term deployment problem.National Cancer Institute (NCI)
